Between the Covers

Softcover. First edition. Slim octavo. Spine faintly sunned and cover trifle rubbed, just about fine. Issued in 500 numbered copies, this copy is unnumbered. An early appearance by Brooks, featuring her sonnet "Gay Chaps at the Bar," for which she won the Eunice Tietjens Award. This volume features prize-winning poems submitted to a contest at the Fifth Annual Northwestern University Writers' Conference, as well as eight poems discussed in Paul Engle's poetry workshop and "chosen by him as outstanding." In her contribution to the 75th Anniversary issue of *Poetry* in 1987, Brooks wrote: "I see myself at fourteen—when I first began to pound at the gates of the magazine Poetry!... the rejection slips gradually gentled. Finally, in 1944, Paul Engle of Iowa sent a group of my poems to the editors—and at last I was starred in the cherished magazine... ." "Gay Chaps at the Bar" was one of the poems Engle submitted; it was published in *Poetry* (with an epigraph not published here) in November, 1944. Printed in Muscatine, Iowa, by Carroll Coleman at The Prairie Press. Uncommon.

Item #545207